Mostly about games, but with occasional detours into other nerdy territories.

7S: A Small Danger Hack

Ok, this is a very small hack for 7th Sea that introduces an additional use for the Danger Pool, with some (hopefully) interesting consequences.

The addendum is this – Danger may be spent to:

Introduce a consequence into an action or dramatic sequence. This can be done when villains would act (even if there are no villains in the scene) and takes effect the next time villains would act.

Pretty simple. The timing is the most complicated part, but that’s harder to explain than it is to implement because it’s specific to how action order works. To unpack it a little, when the GM starts with “Ok, 5 raises?” then normally any villain with 5 raises would act, then players would. This spend happens during the slice when that villain action would normally occur, whether or not there is actually a villain acting.

Ok, so that’s all well and good, but why do I want to add such a rule? Two reasons, one simple, one a little more involved.

The simple one is this: I end every session with a stack of points in the danger pool, and that is not desirable. I want more things to spend them on.

This is a result of the fact that the uses of the danger pool end up fairly limited for me in practice. Murder doesn’t come up often. Increasing the total needed for a raise is such a jerk move that I use it very rarely. Activating special abilities is fine, but the kicker is that adding dice – which seems like it should be the go-to move – is less useful than you might think. Consider when you roll dice as the GM. It’s more or less limited to action/dramatic sequences, and specifically it’s at the beginning of the sequence. So it might come in handy to beef up a pool or offset a bad roll, but once the scene actually begins, that’s it. Introducing a spend “in flight” gives me more opportunities to spend danger (and by extension, puts more pressure on me to help my players generate Hero Points, since that’s my most efficient way to get Danger). I think if I can increase the flow of currency, it’s going to feel a lot more fun to spend it.

And that leads into the second reason, and that is that this allows for more dynamic action.

To unpack that a little, it’s worth looking at how action sequences actually play, with and without villains. If you have villains, then villain actions provide a certain amount of push and dynamism in the action, but only some, because the villain is usually greatly outnumbered. If you have only brutes, then there’s no real dynamism, since the scene only reacts to the characters if there are brutes still standing at the end.1

This is complicated further by the lack of henchman rules2. Villains are kind of a big deal, and including a villain in every fight is actually quite complicating if you do it by the book. So how do you get the tempo advantages of a villain without actually having a villain in play? With danger.

So, spending to make things happen during the fight has some obvious benefits, but there is also a subtle benefit to the pacing. See, when a villain spends a raise to act, that action happens. There is no threat or buildup – they simply do it, and that can lead to some rough situations, as illustrated by the villain in the example stealing the MacGuffin by sheer narrative brute force.

So, in contrast, one of the key cadence elements of diceless play (which sequences effectively are) is threat -> response. The opposition does something which will have consequences if it carries through, which drives players to take action to counter, redirect or mitigate (though not nullify – nullify is the “I Dodge”, it’s dull). By introducing consequences in flight, the GM is now armed with threats, and players can respond or ignore as suits them, but in either case it introduces a little back and forth.

(Now, I have to admit there’s a third reason. I have some awesome tokens that I use for Danger & Hero points, and one of my favorite things to do as a GM is to toss one into the middle of the table and declare something horrible. It’s just fun. So any excuse to do that is a win.)

Anyway, this is going to be used in my next session. Will report on how it goes.

Unless special abilities are triggered, but those have limitations, and have a weird sort of absolutism to them as written. Especially kidnapper and thief if the point of the conflict is to prevent a kidnapping or theft. ↩︎

Henchmen were a construct in First Edition 7th Sea, who were better than brutes, but less good than villains. They’re actually very easy to implement in the new 7th Sea – just give an NPC a die pool and let her roll without the other villain trappings – but it feels like an intentional absence, so I tread carefully around it. ↩︎

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5 thoughts on “7S: A Small Danger Hack”

So, is the idea here that, in the middle of a scene (fighting on a pair of ships) you could add in a bit of danger “there’s a reef dead ahead, if nobody does anything, your ship will run aground on it.”?

For the most part, I don’t think you really need to spend a danger point to introduce that sort of stuff into the scene. But it does make sense, and as a GM I’m all for more things to throw Danger Points at.

I was prepping for my 7th Sea game starting, and in Heroes and Villains there’s this passage on Lesser Villains (pg 109), which does take care of the need for Henchmen, which is something I saw the need for in the Quickstart as well:

“These lieutenants function identically to other Villains in most ways except one—Lesser Villains do
not have Influence. Any Influence needed to accomplish a Lesser Villain’s tasks is spent by the boss, and
any Influence gained from actions goes to the boss. This puts a Lesser Villain somewhere between a
regular Villain and a Brute Squad: capable of causing real trouble for the Heroes, but lacking the real power to be trouble without someone backing him up.”